A three-physician internal medicine group asked us last week why their profile on the Medicare.gov compare tool showed quality measure results from two years ago that did not match what they had submitted. The answer was that they had never looked at the preview. Every spring, CMS gives clinicians and groups a window to review the MIPS data that will be published on their public profile pages, and every spring most small practices let it pass. This year the window for 2024 performance data closes on Thursday, June 11, 2026, at 8:00 pm Eastern.
The same month holds a second, quieter deadline. The 2026 Promoting Interoperability category requires a continuous 180-day performance period inside the calendar year, and the last day you can start that period and still fit 180 days before December 31 is July 5, 2026. Miss it and the category cannot be reported for 2026 unless you qualify for a hardship exception.
For physicians who have handed MIPS to a practice manager and never looked back, a glossary line: MIPS is the Merit-based Incentive Payment System, the Medicare Part B program that scores clinicians on quality, cost, improvement activities and promoting interoperability (use of certified EHR technology), and adjusts Medicare payments two years later based on the score. The 2024 score set your 2026 payment adjustment. The 2026 score will set your 2028 adjustment.
Key takeaways
- The MIPS 2024 data preview closes June 11, 2026 at 8:00 pm Eastern; after that, the data is posted to the Provider Data Catalog and to clinician and group profile pages on Medicare.gov.
- Preview is not appeal: you cannot change a 2024 score now, but you can check that the right measures, the right clinicians and the right group are shown, and flag errors to CMS.
- The 2026 Promoting Interoperability performance period must be at least 180 continuous days in 2026, so the latest start date is July 5, 2026.
- CMS is accepting 2026 QPP exception applications (Promoting Interoperability hardship and extreme and uncontrollable circumstances) through December 31, 2026.
- 2025 performance feedback and final scores, which set the 2027 payment adjustment, are expected later this summer with a 60-day targeted review window.
What the preview shows and how to open it
Sign in to the Quality Payment Program website with your HARP credentials (the Health Care Quality Information Systems Access Roles and Profile account that your practice used to submit data). Under the organization, look for the public reporting preview. What you see is the subset of your 2024 MIPS data that CMS intends to publish: quality measure performance rates that met public reporting standards, the improvement activities you attested to, Promoting Interoperability measures, and, for groups, the aggregate results.
Not everything you submitted is published. CMS publishes only measures that meet reliability and case minimum thresholds and that have been designated for public reporting. So a measure you reported with 18 patients may not appear, and that is not an error. What is an error is a clinician listed under a group they left in 2023, a measure result that does not match the submission confirmation you saved, or a specialty label that is wrong.
If you find a problem, the preview page has a link for contacting the QPP Service Center, and CMS asks for the specifics: the TIN, the NPI, the measure and what you believe is wrong. In our experience the most common corrections are clinician-to-group associations, which come from PECOS reassignment records rather than from your MIPS submission. If a departed physician is still reassigned to your TIN in PECOS, fix PECOS, because the compare tool will keep showing them until you do.
Why it matters more than most practices think
We hear "nobody reads Medicare.gov" from practice owners regularly. The evidence says otherwise, at least at the margins. Referral coordinators at hospitals and larger groups check profile pages. Medicare Advantage plans and some commercial payers pull Provider Data Catalog files into their own directories and quality scoring. And the data persists: the 2024 results will sit on your profile until the 2025 results replace them next year. A wrong result stays wrong for twelve months.
There is also a practical point. The preview is the first time many practices see how their submitted measures translate into a public performance rate. If your controlled hypertension measure shows 48 percent and your EHR dashboard says 71 percent, the difference is usually a denominator problem in the submission, and the same problem is probably in your 2025 and 2026 data right now.
The July 5 Promoting Interoperability start date
Promoting Interoperability (PI) is worth 25 percent of the MIPS final score for most clinicians. It requires you to report measures from certified EHR technology over a performance period of at least 180 continuous days within the calendar year. That is a change from the earlier 90-day minimum, and it catches practices that plan to "do PI in the fall."
| Item | 2026 requirement | Practical deadline |
|---|---|---|
| PI performance period | Minimum 180 continuous days in CY 2026 | Start no later than July 5, 2026 |
| Security risk analysis | Conducted or reviewed during CY 2026, attested yes | Before submission; we recommend before the PI period starts |
| SAFER Guides attestation | Annual self-assessment of the High Priority Practices guide, attested yes | During CY 2026 |
| Required PI measures | e-Prescribing, Health Information Exchange, Provider to Patient Exchange, Public Health and Clinical Data Exchange, plus the yes/no attestations | Data collected across the 180 days |
| Hardship or reweighting exception | Application for PI hardship or extreme and uncontrollable circumstances | Accepted through December 31, 2026 |
A worked example. A practice decides on June 20 that it will report PI for 2026. The EHR vendor confirms the measure dashboard is active. The practice picks July 1 as the start date, which gives 184 days to December 31. Good. A practice that waits until after the July 4 holiday and picks July 10 has 175 days, and there is no partial credit. If you are not sure your EHR is capturing the measures correctly, start the period on the earliest date you can defend and verify the dashboard in August, when there is still time to fix a broken interface.
Two things trip practices up here. First, the Public Health and Clinical Data Exchange measure requires active engagement with registries (immunization registry and electronic case reporting are the required ones for most), and "active engagement" has documentation requirements that take weeks to satisfy if you have never registered. Second, the Health Information Exchange measure can be met through bidirectional exchange with a health information exchange, but the attestation needs the HIE connection to have been live for the whole performance period.
What is coming later this summer
CMS typically releases MIPS performance feedback and final scores for the prior performance year in the summer, and 2025 scores will determine 2027 payment adjustments, which can range from a penalty of up to 9 percent to a positive adjustment scaled to available funds. When the feedback is released, a 60-day targeted review window opens for clinicians who believe their score or adjustment was calculated incorrectly. We will write about that when the date is announced. For now, the practical preparation is to find your 2025 submission confirmations and keep them where the person who will file a targeted review can reach them.
The 2026 performance threshold remains 75 points, so a practice that is not scoring above that mark is heading toward a penalty in 2028. If your practice is working on both MIPS and PCMH recognition, the two overlap substantially in quality measurement and care coordination, and our PCMH transformation work usually covers the MIPS quality and improvement activity categories at the same time.
Questions we hear
We are a small practice under the low-volume threshold. Do we need to preview anything?
If you were excluded from MIPS for 2024, you did not submit data and there is nothing to preview. Check your participation status on the QPP website by NPI. If you opted in voluntarily, your data will be published like anyone else's.
Can we opt out of public reporting?
No. Public reporting of MIPS data is required by law. What you control is the accuracy of the data during the preview and, going forward, which measures you choose to report.
Our EHR vendor says PI reporting is "automatic." Do we still need a start date?
Yes. The vendor calculates measure numerators and denominators, but you choose the performance period when you submit, and it must be at least 180 continuous days. Write the start date down now and confirm with the vendor that the dashboard can report on exactly that range.
What to do this week
- Sign in to the QPP website before June 11, 2026 at 8:00 pm Eastern and review every clinician's and the group's 2024 preview data.
- Compare the previewed measure rates with your saved 2024 submission confirmation and report discrepancies to the QPP Service Center.
- Check PECOS reassignments for clinicians who have left, and file the CMS-855R termination if they are still attached to your TIN.
- Pick your 2026 Promoting Interoperability start date (July 5 at the latest) and record it in the compliance calendar.
- Confirm immunization registry and electronic case reporting active engagement status with your EHR vendor and state registry.
- Locate your 2025 submission confirmations and store them with the person who will handle targeted review this summer.
